The bear garden of Prime Minister’s Questions may tell you otherwise, but there are a lot of friendships across the party divide.

Indeed, some of these can be easier to maintain than with your own side.

The competition with colleagues of the same party is very personal. With the other lot, it’s more detached.

Not long ago I was chatting with a very senior Conservative minister, and pal of mine, about government versus opposition.

Like me, he’d had to spend years in the grunge of opposition, wondering whether his party would ever gain power. We talked of the frustrations of being in the Shadow Cabinet. The French call it the cabinet fantôme, which gives you a better idea of how it feels.

We both agreed that the position of Leader of the Opposition is, by a big margin, the worst job in British politics — whoever’s doing it.

You’re bashed if you try to keep your options open, and speak only in generalisations in a particular policy area.

But if you come forward with very specific policy proposals, you can be torn to shreds for being ‘unrealistic’, or have the idea pinched from you — or both.

Take the idea of a freeze on energy prices.

When Labour Leader Ed Miliband proposed this last autumn the trash machine got going. A ‘big con’ said the Energy Minister, Ed Davey. It would result in ‘freezing investment’ rather than prices, said a big energy company.

But hang on. I woke yesterday morning to hear that one of Britain’s biggest energy companies (SSE) was itself pledging to freeze its domestic gas and electricity prices until 2016.

Hadn’t I heard that somewhere before? Who’s now saying that such a freeze is a ‘con’?

I don’t complain. This is politics. We tried to do the same when we were in government. It’s one of the prices you pay for being out of power.

I doubt if anyone in East Lancashire, where wage rates are lower than the national average, but energy bills the same, will complain either.